This week's sidebar poll: Did you uninstall the Facebook Messenger app?

Permissions can be scary

Facebook had a pretty rough week. If you weren't paying attention, the Huffington Post used Facebook Messenger for Android as an example of an app with some crazy-scary permissions back in December of last year (that post has been updated, by the by) and it got picked up again and went viral across both the Internet as well as mainstream media. The sky was falling, and Facebook was painted as a company that didn't care about you, your privacy, or your data.

Of course, none of that is true. Facebook may not have the best privacy track-record, but they're not abusing Android permissions to steal your soul. Phil did an excellent job of explaining why those permissions were there, as well as spurring some talk about how things could be done better — both by application developers and Google themselves. In addition, Facebook has finally explained their permissions on their help pages.

Read: Facebook Messenger permissions: Not as scary as the stories might have you believe

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